My First Ever Lunar Mosaic Image

[Fir Chlis]

Since getting my ASI585MC camera in January, I've been doing EAA observations on DSOs, but last night there was a smear of cloud over the whole sky, masking the stars and leaving even the Moon with a fuzzy halo. I'd already set up, so I thought I'd test out the SharpCap Lunar Mosaic Planner, as the moon was bigger than my FoV with my Skywatcher 200PDS, but I was not expecting a particularly good image, given the haze. I discovered the almost fully automated auto-align option in SharpCap, and was very impressed with what it did.

I ended up with two panels, 1000 x 29ms exposures for each panel, although the frame rate was just 2 fps. When doing polar align I usually leave this set low to keep the camera temperature down, as I don't need a fast frame rate while setting up, and I'd forgotten to reset it to maximum.

I spent all this morning working out how to stack with Autostakkert (keeping 50% of the frames), sharpen with Registax, and stitch panels with GIMP. It's going to be a lot quicker in future as I know now how to perform these tasks.

This is the result, a bit overexposed in some places, but an image that I'm happy with for my first try. I was pleasantly surprised, given the poor seeing, how much the image could be sharpened and enhanced after the event.

Geoff

Edited March 21 by Fir Chlis